sinned against classes of citizens, and the people were threatened with a breakdown of all government, by the misuse of majority power. It has been the fashion of historians to blame the Congress of the Confederation with the ills of 1781-1789, but that was an honest, and, when possible, a hard-working body, and the real culprit was not the impotent shadow of national government, possessing almost no powers for good and therefore scarcely any powers for evil, but the all-powerful state legislatures, which proved again and again, as Jefferson asserted, that "one hundred and seventy-three despots would surely be as oppressive as one."[1]
The revolt of Shays, and the less aggressive but universal discontent against the state governments were protests too loud spoken not to warn the legislatures of their own peril, and in a frightened, half-hearted way, they one by one gave their consent to the assembling of a convention to plan such changes in the articles of confederation as should at least give to the state governments a national protection from their own citizens.[2] Accordingly, in June, 1787, a body of the most earnest and experienced men gathered in Philadelphia and set about the task of framing a new national government.
Not a few of the members of the federal convention had been sufferers by the injustice of state laws,[3] and they were prepared to apply the knife deeply to the malady of the body politic. Indeed, those who had but a few years before started out as strong democrats had re-acted. Dread of the people and dread of democratic government were felt by all those who did not draw the
- ↑ "Notes on Virginia," 157.
- ↑ It was fear that Shays's revolt would spread to within the borders of its own state that made the New York legislature vote the call for the federal convention, and the fright it gave Massachusetts was the cause for the assent of her assembly to what it had negatived but a few months before.
- ↑ As an example, Washington had bonds and mortgages to "nigh £10,000" paid off in depreciated paper money, worth at times as little as 2/6 in the pound, and when he attended the federal convention, he was in arrears for two years' taxes through having been unable to sell the products of his farms.
